My AI Policy
To my fellow writers and prospective writing collaborators,
From the start, you should know where I stand on AI relative to the creative work we do together, so here we go: I want as little AI involvement as possible. Zero would be ideal, which means we’ll create your book as the masters have done for centuries: by thinking, writing, and revising using that magnificent machine, the human brain.
Generative AI exists because it’s trained on content created by humans who already thought the thoughts, created the sentences, did the work. So by definition, AI-generated sentences and phrases are plagiarism. That includes content that was generated by AI, then tweaked, disguised, humanized—whatever you want to call it. So if you’ve entered your writing into Claude or Gemini or Chat, etc. and AI delivered revised content, you can’t ethically claim this as your writing. Also consider how generic and processed AI content is. When you let AI create or revise for you, it’s not your voice, and it shows.
Being asked to work on sentences churned out by robots is soul bruising. I’ve studied writing craft for decades, and I’m a lifelong lover of words and language and original thought. I have great respect for ideas, intelligent phrasing, and people who create, and I want to work with people who share that respect. While I hope and expect AI is going to dramatically advance medicine, climate science, business efficiency, and so on, this is art we’re talking about. Real art requires originality and authenticity. So please don’t ask me to help artificial intelligence get better at emulating human-generated work, and please don’t ask me to improve anything AI has produced.
I understand that AI is ubiquitous and often used before the writing begins. If you use AI for brainstorming or organization, that’s okay. But please tell me up front whether you used it to develop your manuscript and, if so, how.
What's allowed:
Research
Using AI tools for research, just as we’ve all used search engines like Google for years.
Developmental Assistance
Using AI as a tool to help you develop characters or plot or other story elements and to help you organize the content is acceptable. For example, you might ask an AI source something like, “What personality characteristics might I give the grumpy hotel doorman in my novel about a leprechaun who goes to Wall Street and makes billions but then crashes the entire system?” or “Can you help me think of ways to add more conflict on a wedding day already fraught with family division?” Then when the robots offer suggestions, let your discretion and standards for your own authorship be your guides as you decide to what degree the input finds its way into your storytelling. But again, no AI-generated sentences. Ever.
What's not allowed:
Content Generation or Revising/Editing
As we in the publishing industry see it, if you cut and paste or otherwise incorporate AI-generated content into your manuscript, the work is no longer yours. You should also know that AI-generated content can’t be copyrighted. Just as important to publishers and to me is the fact that sentences or phrases produced by AI—regardless of whether their creation was initiated or directed by a person—isn't human generated content.
We’re talking about artificial intelligence vs. actual intelligence. Artificially generated vs. human made. One is original, the other plagiarism. As a writer, you don’t want the book-buying public to doubt the authenticity of a book that bears your name, so let’s work together to make sure your human style and voice stand out, clearly.
As a writer, editor, and representative of the publishing industry, I hold myself to the highest standards of quality and ethics. When we as artists and collaborators adhere to these standards, we honor our readers—readers who buy and read and recommend our books in good faith, trusting that we humans created the works. That trust is everything.